


Je Suis Toute à Vous

by Dorkangel



Series: Thinking Past Tomorrow [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Post-War, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Epistolary, F/M, Families of Choice, Father Figure Washington, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Violence, M/M, Mixed Canon - Musical and Historical, Mixed Media, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Resolution, Revolutionary War, Short Chapters, Trauma, Unconventional Families, Washingdad, Weird discussion of religion, What Happened to Aaron and Theo, What Happened to Laf, World War III, how I live now - Freeform, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-02 20:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6580711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world came suddenly, but its rebuilding will take time. An one-shot exploration of the events directly after 'Is This Where It Gets Me?', in which Lafayette returns to his family in France and we discover the conclusions of some of the loose ends ITWIGM left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Je suis toute à vous - I am all yours. (Adrienne de Lafayette's last words, spoken to her husband on her deathbed.)

They make the front page.

Lafayette, jet-lagged from the emergency flight to Brussels that Washington (God protect him, bless his soul, that fucking avenging angel of a man) managed to get him on, and the coach journey back to Paris from there, laughs until he thinks he’s going to puke. The emotional fallout of leaving the people who kept him alive, and what he suspects with distant terror might be the after-effects of _actual_ fallout saturating the air he breathed and the food he ate for months, mixes up with all the exhaustion and worry into a cocktail: he just can’t deal with the fact that a huge photograph of possibly the last person on earth who’d want to be there is splashed all over the cover of the newspaper his grandmother had to read while she waited for him. Aaron, who kept himself to himself and his opinions quiet. Aaron, staring out at him from the paper.

The picture itself is magnificent. “ _Trés belle_ ,” murmurs his grandmother, looking like a completely different woman to the one that waved him off before the bomb. In the place of elaborate curls and expensive dresses is a severe bun and a practical sweater. After Gran-Père died she sold the country estate that he can’t bring himself to miss one tiny bit, bought the little flat that she lives in now, reached out to Adrienne and the children of the servants they used to employ when their parents went to fight; Laf knows most of the money from the sale has gone to humanitarian relief, and wonders _how did this come out?_ What did thinking about what might be happening to him turn her into?

“ _Trés belle._ ” she repeats. Her fingers linger curiously as she traces over the outline of Aaron’s smooth head. “ _Et trés triste, non?_ ”

“ _Oui_.”

Lafayette thinks he recognises the photographer’s name from the register of people on the emergency flight. A German woman with thick glasses and a bob, fiddling with her camera and drafting up a million letters on her water-damaged laptop – maybe it was her, anyway, Lafayette’s actual ability to pay attention to his fellow passengers was diverted mainly to the Italian twenty-something and his crying baby sitting across the aisle.

If he could cry at the newspaper, he would. But his tears are all used up, soaked into the ratting couch at the safehouse and the earth where the explosion in the forest threw him, and Eliza and John and Alexander are keeping them safe for him. He has no more crying spare.

The photo shows Aaron wearing a wide, heartbroken kind of smile that Laf doesn’t recognise, his arms wrapped a girl whose face is hidden by the braids that betray her sudden movement, thrown forward around the both of them. His backpack (Eliza’s backpack) and the thick coat he’d left them in are visible on his shoulders, but the only girl is in only shorts and a t-shirt that she must have been taken hostage in.

 **RÉUNIR** , reads the headline. **REUNITED**.

“That’s Theodosia!” Laf had gasped, squirming out of the third of his grandmother’s desperate embraces, this one in the kitchen of her flat. “That’s Aaron, and his Theo! He found her!”

That was when the irony had hit him, like a small freight train, and he started to laugh with hysterical relief. And realises suddenly how twisted it is to be laughing. And sits down heavily on her rugs; first with his head on his knees, then into a foetal position. He doesn’t cry anymore – it’s a near thing, though.

When she mutters something about shock and pulls him up towards the room she set out – _like a baby_ , he thinks, _like the shaking pre-teen that she and Pépé took home after the car crash_ – he is placid and compliant and lets her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adrienne time!

He knows he’s a mess the next morning, but he can’t bring himself to care. It probably isn’t even morning anymore, or at least coming close to past noon; the clock on his wall is broken and absolutely no help. Across from where he cracks open one eye it ticks the same second over and over.

Being perhaps not the smartest of human beings, Lafayette somehow, _somehow_ , manages to forget that there is a girl living with him now. A girl who hasn’t seen him bleeding and panicking, not like Eliza or Peggy or Angelica or Maria, and whom he can’t rely on not to judge him. And so he stumbles into the kitchen in only his boxers.

Possibly the worst part of the whole fiasco is that Adrienne looks picture-perfect despite the whole world having gone to shit around her: her nails are filed to identical points, but not painted; her hair is brushed neatly over her shoulders, but not straightened; she’s wearing make up, but only mascara and powder. The headscarf that – even if she couldn’t wear it to school – she used to drape elegantly over her hair is gone. Faith in war, he thinks, is a weird thing. He has thought of God selfishly at all, praying _please don’t let me die_. But neither he nor Adrienne was ever sincerely devout.

She’s sitting at the table, and gasps when she sees him, standing so suddenly that her chair screeches its displeasure.

“ _Laf_ -”

“Adrienne!”

“Down, down,” chides his grandmother, gesturing with a spatula. She has the expression of a fish out of water standing at the stove. “Please, no screaming in my home.”

“ _Mais oui, nous devons conserver notre dignité aristocratique._ ” he forces himself to joke, as though his smile isn’t trembling, and bows very low to her. But there is no groan at his terrible sense of humour, no Adrienne asking him to sit down for breakfast (lunch?) or Gran-Mère sighing at his critique of their social class. Instead, there is a heavy silence that he feels burning in the air.

Lafayette straights suddenly, apprehension like a hot coal in his stomach, and is frightened at their twin expressions of worry.

“Did that come from a _bullet_?” blurts his grandmother. Her eyes are popping, almost comically wide, but he cannot find it in himself to laugh. Dammit. The scar is fairly small and impossible for him to see without contorting in front of mirror, and he forgets it is there – _why didn’t I wear a shirt?_

“Yes,” he admits, face burning. “But it was only a flesh wound. Don’t worry.”

“People shot at you?!” This time, it is Adrienne that speaks, and her gaze is ashen with a kind of retrospective dread. “You said that you were in a safehouse-”

“I was!” he protests, then realises that perhaps he has already worried them enough and caves. “...For the last couple of months or so.”

“ _Months!_ ”

Maybe because of the way that he has compartmentalised the war into the sections of it he has experienced – observing the war from France, going to America, leaving his hotel and meeting Alex, the panicked week surrounding the bomb, the months of wandering, the frantic days onward from John’s house, and then the safehouse, and finally going home from there – Lafayette doesn’t really remember that it’s been just under a year.

“Laf, what were you doing for all that time?” Adrienne whispers, underneath his grandmother’s shriek. “You- you could have died-”

“Yes, I was in danger.” His voice is numb, empty. “I didn’t mean to be – we had to run. From everything.”

Both of the women stare at him, and he feels a guilty wrench in his stomach at the sudden longing to be back in America, for his balcony and the roses that Peggy had almost trained to reach it, for cooking with Hercules and watching everyone pretend to enjoy the unholy culinary results.

“I’ll go.” he cuts, before either of them can say anything. “I’ll go get dressed.”

He flees. There’s no point in even trying to disguise the thudding of his bare feet against the soft white carpet as anything other than what it is – running like a coward from a situation that terrifies him – but he can barely dare, even privately, to admit that slumping down against his hastily slammed door is the surrender that it is. How is he meant to live here when he can’t deal with the realities of his own family’s caring? How is he meant to cope?

Shared experiences, shared trauma, forge bonds of the kind that Lafayette hasn’t known before. He doesn’t have them with Adrienne or his grandmother. And all of a sudden it seems incredibly selfish to throw away those bonds in the way that he did, to abandon them just so that he could back to this not-a-home.

No. This is what is normal now, and he can visit his friends when the world recovers a little of its sanity. This is what he has to do, and he knows it, because Washington had told them. They have to forge a new world of diplomatic relations, and Laf knows that he can help that.

He will write to them, though, he decides. As soon as possible.

*

This time he wanders into the kitchen he is wearing a neat white shirt that he most certainly did not have in the scant bag he took back from America. Gran-Mère has disappeared off to complete her apparently still considerable toilette, the pancakes she was struggling with untouched on the table, and so they are alone.

Adrienne’s pianist’s fingers lie delicately on his back as her arms loop around his shoulders, and her long eyelashes leave butterfly kisses on his cheek that make him shiver.

“I am sorry,” she tells him, in English. Her accent is even poorer than his, and her words are more cautious with her lack of practice, but he appreciates the gesture that she is making for him. “I did not mean to speak in a manner so... accusatory? It was only, when we got word from _Les_ _Etats-Unis_ that you were safe, we were so relieved. We would say to each other, ‘When we were in those bomb shelters, at least Gilbert was not worried for his life. At least sending him away was not all bad.’ But now we are imagining all the things that happened to you. Or could have happened. Yes?”

He nods, silent and ashamed, and allows her to thoughtfully consider the scar peeking out from his hairline.

“This was taken care of?”

 _Thank you for not asking how it came to be_ , he doesn’t say. _Thank you for not forcing me to explain that I was in even more immediate danger than you think._

“Yes,” he says instead. “My friend, John, he cleaned it.”

“Good, then.” She slips back into French as her expression brightens, and tugs him over to the table where last night’s newspaper still rests. “Come and tell me about all these friends of yours; your Alex and John and the boy in this photo. And the girl! _Elle est jolie._ ”

“Her name is Theo, but I never met her.” he smiles. “Aaron went away to find her.”

“Like a princess in a fairytale.”

Laf doesn’t fall for the wistfulness in her soft tone: other than maybe Alex, Adrienne is the most highly-strung person he’s ever met. “You’re prettier than any princess, though. Don’t worry.”

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (For those who don't know, France is entirely secular and doesn't allow kids to wear hijab to school.)


	3. Chapter 3

_Dear Alexander Hamilt-_ he writes, in the privacy of the locked bathroom as he pretends to shower, then crosses it out. Too formal.

_Alex (and everyone else)_

_I am ~~safe~~ in Paris with my family. Gran-_ _Père_ _is ~~dead~~ gone, but my grandmother has an apartment here where she has kept a room for me. And because her parents are fighting, my friend Adrienne is here. I think that I told you a story about her – as of now, she hasn’t kissed me, but I will resort to my cutest behaviour to rectify the situation._

_~~Things have changed. It’s like the whole country is in shock. I don’t know how to live here.~~ _

_I know Aaron is okay, in case he still hasn’t come home. There’s a picture of him with the released captives in the newspaper. Front page!_

_Angelica’s records, or at least the drafts from when I went, are hidden in the lining of my bag._ La liberté individuelle _is very important in my country, but between both France and America’s wartime censorship, I don’t think I can let anybody read them yet. Even Adrienne doesn’t know that they exist yet, and I’m not leaking a single page until I’m no one will be hurt on account of them. Especially not me. I don’t want to put myself in danger, because I’m not very brave, you see. I’m so sorry._

_As is only natural, I imagine you are all crying over my absence all day every day, unable to console yourselves. Of course, this is only right and proper – apart from Sally!! If she is sad, do anything to make her happy!! She deserves it._

Sally had wanted to come to France with him, too young to understand the political stalemate that the world is held in, and he can’t help but worry that by leaving her he has irrevocably fractured the fragile trust that she placed in his care. It had hurt to walk away from Alexander, but the circumstances are not the same; Alexander is an adult. Almost. And furthermore, he’s a man who knows exactly how this new America is going to work, intending to help forge it.

 _Of course,_ he writes, and his pen stills on the page as he hesitates. _I can’t post this. I will send you- something. I suppose a milder version of this letter, although I don’t know yet, because you know it’ll be opened and read by like eight secret services before you get it. In it I will enclose Aaron’s news article for you all to laugh at, and I will hide this with the records. Or under the floor or something. Who knows._

_I miss you._

For a moment he considers signing his full name, then decides against it, if only because he’s already wasted enough hours of his life doing that.

_Gil Lafayette x_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My exams start next week. This is an apologetic update, as I have (in draft) finished, and will try to update whenever I have the upper hand on my GCSEs.
> 
> Edit, /03/02/2018: Well, lads. My GCSEs came and went and it's very nearly my final A-Level exams, so long story short this isn't going to be completed. The draft of this story disappeared when I got a new phone and I couldn't bring myself to write it again. I was actually planning to delete this, but on rereading it kind of stands by itself, so I'm going to mark it as complete, change the description, and leave it. I'm sorry if anyone was planning on reading further, but if anyone does have any ideas about this 'verse, for sure feel free to contact me or just write something!


End file.
